


we'll find paradise

by captbuccaneer



Category: Ride or Die (Visual Novel)
Genre: Angst with a Hopeful Ending, Backstory, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Emotional Baggage, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-07
Updated: 2019-07-07
Packaged: 2020-06-24 06:25:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19718032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captbuccaneer/pseuds/captbuccaneer
Summary: People tell him he has his father’s eyes, but sometimes when his body shakes with so much rage it threatens to break him, he thinks he inherited something worse.





	we'll find paradise

**Author's Note:**

> My piece for Colt's day as part of Ride or Die Appreciation Week on tumblr! You can find the fic vibes playlist [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/falconer789/playlist/36M9leONzyh3Oldphh58Ao?si=8GB8CG0SR_GIv1Z5O3h3Eg).

His father wears anger like a second skin.

Teppei Kaneko’s rule over his shop is absolute, quiet until it’s not, and even as a kid Colt knows that when his Pop gets that look in his eyes it’s either hide or get caught in the blast. When Pop’s angry, he’s not the Pop who puts on car movies and makes popcorn and nudges Colt so he doesn’t miss the next part. When Pop’s angry, he’s Kaneko: dangerous, terrifying, and _king_. 

He loves his Pop.

He fears Kaneko.

People tell him he has his father’s eyes, but sometimes when his little body shakes with so much rage it threatens to break him, he thinks he inherited something worse.

The part he hates most about falling is the wild feeling in the pit of his stomach as he plummets. The next is the impact.

Or maybe he just hates falling in general.

The water is freezing under overcast skies. It’s nothing like the pool his mother sometimes takes him to on weekends he doesn’t see his father. Instead it’s murky and agitated and his imagination kicks into overdrive, feeding him image after image of sea monsters in the depths below, ready to pull him underneath and eat him while he drowns.

He thrashes between the waves, looking up at the cliff, hoping against hope that he’ll be able to see his Pop peering over the edge to make sure he’s ok. 

Pop isn’t looking down from the cliff. Colt was stupid to think otherwise.

His teeth chatter when he heaves himself out and climbs all the way back up to the top, shivering violently in his sopping clothes. Pop’s in the same position as before, arms crossed and eyes trained on the horizon. Again, he tells Colt. Jump again.

This time when he surfaces, he can’t tell if the salt on his tongue is from his tears or the sea.

At 8, Colt’s deepest secret is he wishes he had a different dad. His darkest is he doesn’t wish that at all.

Sometime between growing up and spending more time at the shop, he learns what his father actually does for a living and it’s an exciting, new world. It’s his family history, the family business, and one Colt wants more than anything to be a part of and one he thinks he’d be good at.

His father disagrees. His father disagrees vehemently. Maybe not in so many words at first, but it’s not hard to guess why Colt’s only allowed in the shop on some weekends and not others, why some conversations abruptly come to a halt whenever he draws near.

The moments etch themselves unpleasantly into his skin, because he doesn’t understand.

Pop shares every other aspect of his life with him -- teaching him to drive, to drift, anything he could ever want to know about cars -- but not what he wants most. Every time he asks, Pop gives him a short “no” with a crease between his brows and a downturned mouth as if Colt’s asking for something painful and impossible.

He barges in on a meeting once when they’re preparing for a job to demand they let him in, sick and tired of being left out, and it’s the beginning of the end. Never has he seen his father so furious, and it’s never, ever been directed at him.

In this moment, Pop and Teppei Kaneko cease being two people. Colt stops being scared altogether, opting instead to stand his ground and demand respect for being his father’s son.

Teppei laughs bitterly, and throws him out.

His mom moves away a month later, and he goes with her. She insists it’s because she found a better job in another state with a great school district and cheap in-state tuition. Teppei calls it an opportunity to explore his options and his future, but Colt can recognize exile when he sees it. There’s so much wrongness in leaving California and it pulls at him with every step he takes, leaving a hollow feeling between his ribs that he can only fill with rage, because if he stops to consider how hurt he is over being abandoned, he’ll snap.

He can’t do much from where he is, not yet, but Teppei doesn’t get to decide he wants a son instead of an heir when he raised him at the foot of his throne.

Colt grudgingly does the school thing because his mom asks him to. 

It wouldn’t be a bad life. He could get his degree, get an office job and benefits and a 401(k), wear pressed button-ups and wingtip shoes and go out with friends on the weekend. Many people do it, and they seem content enough. For over a year he throws himself into college, losing himself to classes and classmates alike in a blur of secondhand textbooks and shitty beer and sloppy hookups, pretending he’s there because he wants to be, just like everyone else.

To his credit, he does try. But in the end, it feels like suffocating little by little, and Colt has no interest in dying before he’s lived.

He roars back into California on his motorcycle with a different state’s license plate, carrying nothing but a rucksack and an axe to grind. Los Angeles is mostly the same: smoggy skies, congested freeways, construction on every other street. It’s comforting in its familiarity, that he can spend years away and LA will be just as much of a shithole when he returns.

The savage pleasure he gets from the shock on Teppei’s face is a good enough welcome home.

Logically he knows his father runs a crew and needs people to be in it, but it’s another thing entirely to see that most everyone is the same except for the one he’s been replaced with. Logan’s a simple pretty-boy who Colt is surprised can string more than two words together and he’s more than a little insulted that _this_ is his replacement, but at least he’s not sent away like he expects.

What he also doesn’t expect is _her_.

She’s a pretty wisp of a thing that sticks out like a sore thumb and Colt hates her on sight. He’s an ass to her but she gives as good as she gets, meeting him barb for barb with a pointed glare. If he was at all inclined to fall in love with a tourist, that would do it.

He doesn’t understand why she’s there at first. By all appearances, she’s slumming it at the shop instead of spending her days studying or hanging out with a father who actually wants her around. Unlike the rest of the crew, she’s got a great future already laid out for her.

It’s not until he’s sitting in her passenger seat before her license test, observing the way she comes alive when she masters drifting and upends his entire worldview in a single breath, that it clicks, and.

 _Oh_.

She bursts out of the DMV in a flurry of excitement, waving at him like mad and grinning so wide it blinds him, and his traitorous heart skips a beat.

Colt can count on one hand the number of times he’s been genuinely frozen in terror, but none come close to finding his dad slumped over in a pool of his own blood. Suddenly he’s a little scared boy again and he forgets himself in that moment, forgets that he’s supposed to be furious at his at his father, because words like blood and injury and weakness shouldn’t exist in the same sentence as Teppei Kaneko.

His bloodied hands won’t stop fucking shaking. Distantly he registers someone’s arms around him but all he knows is terror until his father wakes, and then he learns he has the Brotherhood to hate.

It is, after all, easier to be angry.

“It’s okay to admit you’re worried.”

“It’s okay if something just takes your breath away.”

She says things like that a lot, like it’s that easy. For her, it probably is. She wears her heart on her sleeve in a way Colt envies, so free with her thoughts and emotions it’s almost painful for him to watch.

Anger is his oldest, most comforting friend and the one that’s easiest to run to when the other emotions start creeping in. But she sees right through his bullshit and calls him out on it and then some and he’s left floundering, thrown off his axis by someone he thought would cut and run if he just insulted her enough.

It’s kind of nice, being proved wrong on something like that.

They jump off the cliff together, her for the first time and him for the first time in years, and the water closing in around him is different somehow: more like a friend welcoming him back after a long absence than a monster waiting in the wings to devour him. Maybe it has something to do with how he’s changed, but he thinks it has everything to do with the girl squeezing his hand.

When she kisses him, it’s clear she’s never kissed anyone before. Her mouth is clumsy against his but like each new thing he’s seen her try, she masters it quickly with the next kiss and the next and steals his breath right out from his lungs.

For the first time since returning he allows himself to want something besides what he came back for, and at the first hint of guilt instead of reaching for anger, he remembers her words.

Like she said.

It’s ok.

It’s ok to want her.

Coming up with this plan in tandem with his father is not so much crossing a line as it is setting the world on fire and dancing in the flames. Teppei looks at him differently now, has done so since the Grapevine job, and it is everything Colt has ever wanted to be trusted with his family’s legacy the way he deserves.

He takes a moment to look at his Pop, tracking his eyes over new wrinkles and larger eye bags. There’s more gray in his long strands, and a tattoo he hasn’t seen before on his forearm. Pop catches his eye and gives him a ghost of a smile.

It’s a strange thing, to relearn his father at the same time Pop relearns him. 

Bitterness is not a new feeling. That he has to relearn his father at all leaves a foul taste in his mouth if he thinks about it for too long, so Colt ignores it in favor of the task at hand. He has Pop’s trust now, with a chance to prove he belongs, and the first step to doing that is to make sure the Brotherhood disappears forever.

Against all odds, the first part of the plan goes beautifully. When Mona suggests they all go dancing, it’s the promise of their freedom within his grasp that makes him say yes.

Colt isn’t a stranger to falling.

He’s been falling for as long as he can remember. But this time, he is in love with a girl with little recollection of how he got there. All he knows is the swooping feeling in his belly started before they leapt off the cliff and didn’t disappear the way it was supposed to when they hit the water. Instead it’s made itself a home inside him, growing in size until he feels he’s in perpetual nosedive every time he so much as looks at her.

The part he hates most about falling is the wild feeling in the pit of his stomach as he plummets. But in the darkness of the warehouse with each press of her mouth against his, he thinks maybe it isn’t so bad.

Love doesn’t blind him to ugly realities, and the reality is loving her doesn’t make him any less of an asshole.

There’s naked hurt on her face when she bolts out of the shop, crushed by the revelation of his father and Logan’s deception, and yet he can’t stop smiling because she _finally_ knows the way they’ve been using her.

He doesn’t regret what he did, but he does regret how he did it. Hurting her was never on the agenda, or at least that’s what he tells himself when he catches up to her and convinces her to get in her car.

When she kisses him, he can forget just how he’s used her too.

The crew falls apart. Anything that can go wrong does. Their one chance at freedom disappears like smoke in the wind and he transforms into something ugly and jagged in the fallout, barely able to contain the fury in his voice, searching for someone to blame as he escapes with her on his motorcycle.

It is, after all, easier to be angry. Especially when he goes nauseous at the thought of finding her lifeless body in the vault had his plan continued the way it was supposed to.

But then, it doesn’t matter anymore. Any relief that she’s still alive burns up with his father and his family’s shop and then all he knows is pain and pain again. All he wants is for it to stop, barely able to hold it together in front of the others, traitorous thoughts screaming in his mind that this is somehow his fault, because it was his plan, and the awful realization makes him want to pull over and empty the contents of his stomach onto the street.

Teppei Kaneko’s blood has been on his hands in more ways than one.

He makes it somehow to the cliffs after leaving the others and it’s there in the dead of night with only the sound of waves for company that he finally breaks. Grief rises in the back of his throat as he collapses at the edge but rage, his ever-present friend, comes to his aid. 

Only this time, instead of one beating the other into submission, they ally and forge a different monster altogether, taking root in his lungs and choking him from the inside out as the explosion replays over and over in his mind.

He is abandoned, all over again, by a father who thought he knew best.

Life cannot possibly be this fucking unfair but even as he thinks it, Colt knows it is. Hot tears spill messy down his cheeks and he sobs, wounded and wild, demanding for the universe to tell him where he went so wrong that his own father would think he would be better off in a world without him in it. 

The universe does not answer, because the universe does not care.

He knows this, but demands anyway.

In the aftermath there is no body to bury and no shop to return to, but the ghost of Teppei Kaneko lingers in every breath of his son. Colt pieces himself together out of ashes, and begins anew.

Maybe it’s harebrained to see her when there’s a price on his head, but her surprise when he appears at her friend’s doorstep is a memory he’ll keep tucked inside his heart for a long time. Shock, then wonder, then awe, and the brightest smile she’s ever given him.

He’s sure he had his reasons for not going to his own prom, but it’s hard to remember any of them when she descends, a vision in pink, down the stairs.

If she wants to go to prom, he’ll give her the best damn time he can.

It’s all so normal, this glimpse into her life, seeing her teachers, friends, classmates. She stands out from all of them in his eyes, miles above where any of them could even aspire to reach, so radiant in her happiness that he can do nothing but drown helplessly in it. 

So it’s everything when he cuts himself open for her, more raw and more vulnerable than he’s ever been in front of anyone, and tells her he loves her with a shaking voice.

The more amazing thing is, she says it back.

He’s been with people before, but no one he wanted. No one he loved. He sinks into her, feeling her breath stutter out of her lungs, and whispers it over and over into her skin like a mantra, worshipping at her altar, because now that he’s said it he’s never taking it back.

_I love you._

_I love you._

_I love you._

It’s not completely unexpected that the Brotherhood finds them. Like everything good in his life, as soon as he’s granted a moment of happiness it’s interrupted or snatched away. What’s different this time, is her.

He’s learned his lesson. Keeping her out of the loop for the first plan didn’t end well for anyone and in the week following his father’s death, he’s run over every little thing that went wrong hundreds of times in his mind until his heart was numb, and it all came down to secrets and lack of trust.

Too little too late, but he knows better now.

Their plan is risky, with more room for error than he’s comfortable with, but it’s the best they can come up with on short notice. His nerves shot, he squeezes her hand before she gets into her car and drives off, unable to force any sort of words out of his throat.

She squeezes back, understanding.

Everything comes down to this last showdown, what’s left of the Mercy Park Crew congregated in a high school parking lot with guns trained on them. His pulse still pounds in his ears from seeing her car roll over and over before coming to a stop roof-down, but she crawls out of a window, alive, and the tightness in his chest loosens where it sat like a stone underneath his sternum since they parted ways at Vaughn’s house. 

And then it’s finished. The Brotherhood is defeated, and it is all because of her.

She goes with him to Ladera Heights and together they watch as the FBI pushes that bastard, handcuffed, out of the house. Relief and triumph and something else war inside him and it’s all he can do to keep from keeling over into the street. It’s over. It’s done. His father is avenged, and he is free, and there is nothing left to do but rebuild.

The Mercy Park Crew may be no more, but he remains, and with him, the legacy of his father and his father’s father before him.

In the moment that’s enough.

She leaves like she’s always planned to and takes half of his heart with her. Colt accepts it despite himself, because this isn’t abandonment. This isn’t about him at all. As much as he wants her to stay and rebuild with him, he doesn’t begrudge her choice to find herself and figure out her place in the world, because it’s more than anyone has ever afforded him. When she returns -- and he has a gut feeling that she will -- he will be here.

She is his driver, forever, and he will wait as long as she needs.

The taste of their good-bye is still on his tongue when he pulls up to the cliffs, parking his motorcycle to the side and trudging over tiredly to sit with his feet dangling over the edge. It’s early in the AM now, and he watches the California sky turn from midnight blue to orange to pink as the sun rises over his back.

The remainder of his heart beats slow and steady within his ribcage, finally at peace, and then he exhales and lets the sunrise take his breath away. 

In the end, she finds her way back to him, and he is whole again.

_Fin_.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr @ matsuoclan


End file.
